Village Craftsmen

Ocracoke Newsletter

March 21, 2011

Traditional Ocracoke
Home Remedies

(Collected by the
Ocracoke High School Yearbook staff, 1972-1973, with minor editing)

General Diseases

Drink
sulfur and molasses to keep disease away

Use
collard leaves on your forehead to bring down a fever

Drink
whiskey and camphor for a headache

If you
have the runs, use paregoric [a camphorated tincture of opium]

For
chicken pox take a black hen or rooster; boil with the feathers still on
and apply on the pox

To
bring out the measles, drink sheep turd tea [According to the 1992 book, Roll Me in Your Arms, Unprintable Ozark
Folksongs and Folklore by Vance Randolf, “A tea made by boiling ‘sheep
dumplings’ is a familiar backwoods medicine. In fact, the laxative
properties of the feces of small animals of the ruminant family (and also
of small or nursing human children, in the German Dreck-apotheke since the sixteenth century) is known to almost
all pastoral populations in the world. A chemical obtained from the
droppings of young goats, under the name of capryllin, is at present the active ingredient in one of the
two most popular commercial laxatives; the active ingredient in the other
one being much less harmless.”

Use
chill tonic for typhoid fever [“Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic,” was a
quinine based patent medicine developed in 1878 that was designed to fight
malaria. Though not exactly “tasteless” it remained a popular remedy for
half a century]

Birth

People
used a midwife when a baby was to be born

For a
pretty navel on a baby, take a raisin with no pit and wrap the raisin in
an old scorched rag about 4” X 4”. Then tie the rag to the baby’s cord
with a belly-band. This will make the navel cord rot quicker.

For
the first few days after the baby’s born, keep quilts over the windows so
that no light reaches the baby’s eyes

In addition to the remedies cited above, I share the following
paragraph from last month's Ocracoke Newsletter, written by a native of
nearby Portsmouth Island who was born in 1894:

"I had never been attended by a
physician until my oldest child was born.My Grandmother Roberts, who grew up on CedarIsland,
came to live with us and grew an herb garden.Like most of Portsmouth,
it was a spot of enchantment.Her plants
were for flavor, fragrance and physic: hot mint tea for colds, sassafras tea
and yaupon tea to purify the blood in Spring, steeped feverfew [a medicinal herb] for reducing
fever, larkspur for stings and bites, and a great store of additional remedies
such as rinsing out nasal passages with sea water, sulfur and molasses for the
blood, mustard plasters for chest cold, honey for a cough, burnt alum and
boiled red oak bark for sore throat, turpentine and salt, fat pork applied to
cuts, soap and sugar applied to boils, and waxed green myrtle bushes to drive
away fleas and insects."

Dr

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